On Valentine’s Day at Soft Robotics a staff member places heart-shaped marshmallow Peeps on a conveyor belt. A mechanical arm snatches them up, one by one,..
On Valentine’s Day at Soft Robotics in Cambridge, Mass. a staff member places heart-shaped marshmallow Peeps on a conveyor belt. A mechanical arm snatches them up, one by one, setting them gently in a nearby box. It isn’t much of a romantic celebration, really. But it is a triumph of sorts.
Soft Robotics’ RL7 and other grippers can reliably perform some of the physical tasks we do countless times a day but have learned to take for granted. They can pick up a pliable object and put it where it needs to go, all without having to identify the object with computer vision systems, or any kind of pre-programming.
Besides the pink Peeps, the startup’s lab is littered with a bizarre array of objects. There are bags of peanuts and various types of produce on one side, a knockoff Furby and plastic Frozen toys across the room. The lab has the makings of a terrible dollar store, each object chosen for its inconsistency of shape, Soft Robotics CEO Carl Vause acknowledges. But the inventory represents a good cross-section of real-world products, he explained.
Founded in 2013, Soft Robotics’ grippers are already being used by manufacturers and retailers to pick and pack everything from chocolates to injection-molded parts to uncooked pizza dough. The grippers don’t look like a human hand. Instead, they are comprised of a cartoonish quartet of rubbery, bright blue fingers that snap onto their target like an octopus clutching its prey.
The name of the company is a nod to both the soft material used to make its grippers and a sub-category in the larger field of robotics. Vause traces his inspiration for the company back to a 2011 paper co-authored by George Whitesides , now a board member at Soft Robotics.
In it, the Harvard professor details a four-legged, X-shaped quadrupedal robot that looked destined to latch onto the face of an unsuspecting passenger in an Alien sequel. “We are interested in a unique class of robots,” the paper explains. “That is, soft robots fabricated in materials […] that do not use a rigid skeleton to provide mechanical strength.
